Chance Encounters, Edition 60
René Magritte: Evoking Mystery
Welcome back to I Require Art’s Substack. Now that the hot August days are giving way to colorful leaves and autumn breezes here in the easter United States, it’s time to explore a new topic. Inspired by the excellent works by René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967) in the collection of The Menil in Houston, Texas, I’ve selected a group of works that convey Magritte’s approach to art.
I take care, as far as possible, to make only paintings that arouse mystery with the precision and enchantment necessary for the life of ideas. – René Magritte
Magritte was a Surrealist and for about three years (1927-1930) he was closely associated with the core Surrealist group in Paris. (For more on Surrealism, see our series on the subject, Chance Encounters 26, 33, 39, and 48.)Prior to his move to Paris, the artist had studied at the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts for two years but he found the teaching there uninspiring. As a teen he had painted in an Impressionist style before moving on to experiments with Cubism and Futurism. Magritte worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory and as a poster designer while he tried to establish himself as a profession painter. Finally in 1926, he found a patron willing to support his work, and left those jobs behind.
In 1922, Magritte was introduced to Giorgio de Chirico’s (Greek-Italian, 1888-1978) painting The Song of Love (1914, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Magritte described his encounter with this painting as “one of the most moving experiences of his life.” The influence of De Chirico’s style of naturalism and an air of mystery clearly influenced the development of Magritte’s art. The Menil’s painting The Dominion of Light (L’empire des lumières) has both of those qualities in abundance.
Completed in 1954, this is one of the group of paintings by Magritte which show a quiet cityscape in which night has fallen among the trees and houses while the sky above is the bright blue of daytime. The artist executed 27 paintings in the group, 17 in oil and 10 in gouache. (One of these canvases was sold at auction in 2024, setting a record price for the artist’s work.) The works were not intended as a series, but share the title L’empire des lumières, sometimes translated The Empire of Light or Lights. The earliest related composition was created in 1939 and the painter returned to the theme regularly for the rest of his life. Many of these copies were created because collectors had asked for copies after seeing the 1954 version (now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy) at the Venice Biennale of that year. Magritte had no qualms about repeating earlier compositions, something he did throughout his life, and created each painting with the same care and attention to detail as the first. In spite of the overall similarity, the compositions have differences in the houses, trees, clouds, and foreground details. In all of them, the contrast of night and day in the same landscape creates the quality of mystery of which Magritte spoke so frequently.
One of Magritte’s constant themes was what he described as “challenging the real world” and one his earliest strategies for doing this was to combine images and words that puzzle the viewer. The Interpretation of Dreams (La clef des songes) of 1927 is an example. The artist painted an illusionistic frame like those that divide specimens in a natural history museum display. Four objects—valise, knife, leaf, and sponge, are displayed in this case, but they don’t seem to have any conceptual or physical relationship to one another. The relative sizes of the objects seem wrong as well; the valise and knife are too small while the leaf seems too large. If we turn to the labels Magritte has supplied, we only become more disoriented. The valise is labeled “the sky” (le ciel), the knife is “the bird” (l’oiseau), and the leaf is “the table” (la table). Only the sponge is correctly identified (l’éponge). One might ponder the questions raised by the labels, images, and grouping in this painting for a long time and never find a logical explanation for what the artist has presented. The artist was purposely defying logic; he wanted to make viewers realize that the interaction of intellect and emotions governs our response to reality. Magritte’s exploration of disjunctions between pictures and language led to his essay “Words and Images” in the last edition of La Révolution surréaliste, a publication produced by the Parisian Surrealists between 1924 and 1929.
Magritte’s wordplay is the focus of one of his best known paintings The Treachery of Images (Le trahison des images), also known by the painted phrase “This is not a pipe. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe).” Painted illusionistically against a neutral background is the image of a pipe. When most people see a recognizable image in a painting or a photograph, they instinctively label the object: “That’s a tree, a chair, a person, a pipe… ” Here, the artist contradicts our instinct with the words below the image. The words are true, of course. No one can fill this pipe with tobacco or smoke it because it’s an image of a pipe. Painted in 1929, the same year as his essay “Words and Images,” this painting epitomized Magritte’s challenge to the habitual ways in which people interact with all images. The other Surrealists may have used different strategies, but like Magritte they wanted to challenge conventional ways of thinking and acting, to reach for surréalité, a combination of conscious and unconscious reality that would free human imagination.
Not long after The Treachery of Images was painted, Magritte was forced to return to Belgium. The closing of his gallery in Paris meant he could no longer afford to remain in France. In Brussels, he and his brother Paul opened an advertising agency, an undertaking which provided a living allowing the artist to continue creating his idiosyncratic Surrealist works. Many observers have connected Magritte’s illustrative style to his experiences in commercial art, but the absence of expressive brushwork and abstract or distorted forms allow the artist to create imagery which has the uncanny ability to appear real and unreal at the same time.
The bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds of The Dominion of Light series appear in Magritte’s 1952 painting Personal Values (Les valeurs personnelles). When the artist sent this work to his art dealer for an exhibition, it was rejected with the explanation that it made the dealer feel depressed and sick. Magritte’s response was that was what a good painting was supposed to do. What is it about this work that was so disturbing to the dealer? The distortion of everyday objects, the giant comb, shaving brush, soap, goblet and match, alongside the miniature bed, armoire, and rugs is certainly part of the answer, but the blue sky walls also contribute to disrupting our sense of logical space. It almost appears as if the room has no walls and the ceiling floats above the room without support. The reflection in the mirrors, more blue sky and a curtained window that shows no sky at all, suggests that the walls have turned inside out. The artist’s skillful representation of the comb, goblet, and brush makes them seem more real than their surroundings. The result is a mental dance between being convinced and unconvinced by Magritte’s image.
It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery. – René Magritte
One of Magritte’s most recognizable motifs is the bowler-hatted man wearing a dark overcoat and trousers and standing impassively in various contexts. He appears in what may be the artist’s most famous painting The Son of Man (1964, private collection) with an apple in front of his face. The men are thought to be self-referential; The Son of Man was meant a self-portrait. In Golconda from The Menil collection, the bowler-hatted man is multiplied, floating in the air around red-roofed apartment buildings. The men are depicted from different angles, frontal and turned slightly left or right. They are arranged in a regularly spaced lattice pattern and those in the distance are progressively smaller to suggest recession into depth. Magritte’s middle-class businessman reflects the artist’s own lifestyle; this is how he dressed. Unlike some of his more flamboyant fellow Surrealists, Magritte and his wife lived in a suburban apartment in a building somewhat like the ones in this painting. Whether he intended this painting to refer to his own life is an open question. The artist found his inspiration in mystifying the familiar, so his use of himself and elements of his home may simply continue his use of familiar motifs.
The title was suggested to Magritte by a poet friend, Louis Scutenaire (Belgian, 1905-1987), and refers to a city in India from which diamonds had been imported to Europe from the mid14th to late 17th century; by the mid-20th century it signified any source of wealth or happiness. Though all the men look the same when viewed from a distance, viewed individually, they have different facial features. One is a portrait of Scutenaire. This contrast between group identity and individuality may be part of Magritte’s intention for this painting.
At the end of the 1940s, Magritte began to paint scenes in which an expected figure, sitting a chair or on a wall was replaced by a coffin. Eventually he incorporated that motif into Surrealist reinterpretations of works by famous predecessors like Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883) and Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748-1825). The latter’s Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800, Louvre, Paris) was transformed by Magritte into the 1951 painting Perspective: Madame Récamier by David. All of the features of the earlier artist’s work are present, the bare room, bronze lamp, sofa, and footrest, but the human figure has been replaced with a casket. The sharp angles of the wooden coffin contrast with the relaxed curves of the young woman in the original painting. The only remnant of that softness is the flowing train of Mme. Récamier’s dress which Magritte has left in place. To me, this work and the other coffin paintings suggest the permanence of art and the transitory nature of human life.
In the 1960s, Magritte began to transform some of his earlier painted compositions into bronze sculptures of which The Menil owns several. David's Madame Récamier (Madame Récamier de David) recreates the artist’s painting but converts the scale to life size. The original painting is not quite two feet tall but the sofa/coffin portion of the sculpture is almost four feet tall and just over six feet long. It is always much harder to judge the effect of a sculpture in a two-dimensional reproduction, but encountering this large, dark bronze object would certainly have a very different effect than the smaller, warm-toned, illusionistic painting.
The sculptures were only one of Magritte’s strategies for reconsidering motifs he had already worked with. As mentioned above, he willingly repeated The Dominion of Light to fulfill the demands of collectors. He also created multiple versions of The Treachery of Images; The Menil owns a small, unexpectedly pink one. Many of his contemporaries disapproved of Magritte’s practice as doing so violates the Modern view of each artwork as a unique self-expression of an artist. Magritte may have been deliberately transgressing that tradition, but many artists have made copies of their own works, to explore the possibilities of new materials or interpretations, to fill demand from buyers, or to have a version for their own collections. Well-known 19th and 20th century examples are Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.
I close with an example of a Surrealist object by Magritte in The Menil’s collection. Many Surrealists made such assemblages, often from found objects; famous examples include Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Luncheon in Fur) (1936, Museum of Modern Art) and and Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (which survives in 4 color versions and 6 off-white ones; an example of the former is in the collection of the Tate Modern, London). Magritte’s object This is a Piece of Cheese (Ceci est un morceau de fromage) suggests the sense of humor behind the deadpan presentations of his ideas. The title obviously plays off The Treachery of Images and its denial of the functional reality of the depicted pipe. This is a Piece of Cheese consists of an oil painting of a wedge of brie in a gilded frame, presented under a glass dome on a pedestal glass cake plate. The glass elements are functional objects but the wedge of cheese is as unreal as the painted pipe. In this case, the title and the painting mislead while the domed glass plate makes one wonder where the real piece of cheese is hidden.
Magritte’s work has had considerable influence both during the artist’s lifetime and since. Many Conceptual artists admire the artist’s use of text, wordplay, and intellectual puzzles in his work. Though Magritte himself disliked the idea, connections can be made between his straightforward depictions of everyday objects and Pop Art. The artist’s style and works have also been influential in popular culture, gracing album art, book covers, film posters, and inspiring theatrical and cinema staging.
Though René Magritte was only briefly part of the Parisian Surrealist circle, his art and ideas share the radical, challenge to conventional thinking of the movement’s leaders. The clarity and simplicity of the artist’s works suggest they are obvious but the art itself often confuses or unsettles viewers. His meticulous rendering is so distinctive his works are readily identifiable and in many cases live on in our memories as we puzzle over what the real meanings might be.
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. – René Magritte
Works by Magritte appear in the following current and upcoming exhibitions:
“Rendezvous of Dreams. Surrealism and German Romanticism,” Hamburger Kunsthalle, Glockengeisserwall 5, Hamburg, Germany, through October 12, 2025 https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/en/exhibitions/rendezvous-dreams
“Magritte and Les Lalanne: In the Mind’s Garden,” Di Donna Galleries, in collaboration with Ben Brown Fine Arts, 744 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, USA. October 9 to December 13, 2025. https://www.didonna.com/exhibitions/magritte-and-les-lalanne-in-the-minds-garden
“The Subterranean Sky. Surrealism in the Moderna Museet Collection,” Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden, through January 1, 2026 https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/surrealism-in-the-moderna-museet-collection/
“Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. November 8, 2025 to February 16, 2026. https://www.philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/dreamworld-surrealism
Magritte’s work is fascinating to view in person, so be on the lookout for it when you visit the museums mentioned in this essay, especially The Menil in Houston. If you have a favorite Magritte, please let us know in the comments.
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This was such an enjoyable read. Magritte is one of my favorites.
I need to amend my statement: l don't like too many of the men associated with surrealism, but the women, wow! Varo is amazing and sort of reminds me of Leonora Carrington (is there a sensibility unique to Surrealist women?). Thanks for the introduction to her!